Infantry attack

In the spring of 1877 Romania went to war against the Ottoman Empire to win its independence, and the young state sent artists to the front alongside its troops. Nicolae Grigorescu rode with the army as its official war painter, sketching the camps, the wounded and the fighting. This small scene of an infantry attack grew out of that campaign. It shows a foot soldier lunging forward with his bayonet, caught in motion rather than posed for a monument. Grigorescu did not actually witness the fiercest combat. He fell ill during the siege of Plevna and worked many of these pictures up afterwards, from his own field sketches and from what the soldiers described to him. Romania was recognised as independent in 1878, and images like this became its first record of that war made by a painter who had been there.